Catchpoint today extended the reach of its monitoring services to include an offering that monitors the devices of end users.

Nik Koutsoukos, chief marketing officer for Catchpoint, said the Employee Experience Monitoring service makes it possible to deploy the same agent software the company employs to track application experience on points-of-presence (PoPs) around the globe to an endpoint device.

With more employees now permanently working across a wider range of geographies in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Koutsoukos said the need to monitor individual application experiences on specific devices has become more pressing.

Accessed via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, Employee Experience Monitoring also provides access to a desktop application that shows both device and network health along with recommendations for resolving issues. That capability provides the guidance many end users who are working from home (WFH) need to resolve issues before creating a job ticket for the IT service desk, noted Koutsoukos.

Employee Experience Monitoring service also goes beyond merely collecting data from endpoints. It correlates the data collected from the endpoint against the network data that Catchpoint is already collecting from more than 850 PoPs around the world. In addition, it also combines real-time endpoint analytics, global user sentiment data and synthetic monitoring to provide deeper insights into the actual end user experience.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, IT teams have been inundated by support calls. However, IT teams traditionally have had very limited visibility into the endpoints they are now being required to remotely support, said Koutsoukos. It’s often impossible to know with certainty whether an application issue is being caused by the device, the network or the local data center or cloud service where the application is deployed, noted Koutsoukos.

Given the probability that employees will be returning to offices full-time is low, it’s clear another approach to manage remote endpoints is required, added Koutsoukos. In fact, as wireless 5G services, which provide more network bandwidth, become more widely accessible there may not ever be a need for employees to return to an office. Internal IT teams, however, will still be expected to troubleshoot application experiences over any type of network, he said.

It’s unclear to what degree the COVID-19 pandemic has forever altered IT service management. The one thing that is certain is the days when IT teams could count on the bulk of users being tethered to either a wired or wireless local area network in an office are pretty much over. Even after a vaccine for COVID-19 is discovered, the bulk of employees will still want to work from home more often to limit the spread of the virus. IT teams, therefore, must come to terms with a new normal that requires tools to not only help them manage end users but also enable end users to help themselves whenever possible.